


Hell Sick

by Phlyarologist



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Pumpkin Spice, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 11:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16491599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: Okay, so, this guy may or may not have put the elevator to Hell out of service. But that could happen to anyone, right? Cut him some slack.





	Hell Sick

**Author's Note:**

> The Original Works tags for this exchange are a gift. I wanted to return the favor to the exchange as a whole.

The elevator rose out of the ground in a billow of oily smoke, as if there was anyone around to impress. Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth the Unending made impatient winding-up gestures with one hand as it went through the whole rigmarole. With another hand he put out his cigarette, and with a third hand he technically wasn't supposed to have while he was on Earth, he fumbled through his pockets for his key fob.

There was no key fob.

The elevator stood before him, a black monolith proportioned to accommodate his eight-foot frame, a slab of obsidian extruded from the world's heart into the third basement of a parking garage. And it continued to stand there no matter how he entreated it.

"Cripes," said the demon, with feeling. He stabbed a finger at the featureless space where the down arrow should have been, but still no response. His anatomically dubious shoulders slumped. And then slumped further, as he crumpled and folded himself back into human disguise. He promised himself it was only temporary.

* * *

"Sorry, fresh out of turpentine," said the barista, who was not a barista.

"Oh, fine," said Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth, "do you have ox blood? You've gotta do curdled ox blood, right?"

"Pumpkin spice latte for my buddy V.J. over here," she called out to a second barista, who _was_ a barista, as opposed to being the disgraced Vampire Queen of Lansing, Michigan.

"There's blood in that?"

"No."

"Is there a secret blood menu?"

"What are you implying?"

"Nothing! Never mind. Pumpkin spice is fine, I enjoy nutmeg's mild hallucinogenic properties. Anyway" - he leaned conspiratorially forward on the counter and lowered his voice - "you're pretty up on the supernatural scene. Has anybody reported finding any weird items? Say, a blue stone the size of a marble that weighs about twenty tons and skeletonizes any human who touches it?"

The barista frowned. "Where's the last place you remember seeing it?"

"I had it when... it was..." The realization came over him unevenly, like trying to spread cold butter. "Oh, crud, I left it on my coffee table. I never even brought it upstairs. I'm the dimwit who locked himself out of Hell."

"Must be a strong coffee table."

"Fun fact: if a human touched it, it would dissolve _only_ their skeleton, leaving the rest intact."

"Pumpkin spice latte for Vijay!" said the barista without fangs.

Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth accepted his drink. Harder to accept was the prospect of life on Earth until he could get new credentials. "Yes," he said, trying not to think about his coffee table or pine after the chaise longue, "Vijay is my human name, that I have had since birth. I definitely was born. I have two human parents, one of whom gestated me in the conventional manner. I'm basic." He sipped the latte. It was delicious, turpentine or no. "Wait. I think I meant 'normal.' I'm a normal person."

"No, you were right the first time."

* * *

Hell's front desk said it would take 800 years to issue him a new key fob. Sure, he could wait, but what if he'd forgotten to program the DVR before he left? Not only would he miss all his shows, it'd be impossible to avoid spoilers until he caught up. Denizens of Hell, as a class, do not respect protests that "I'm only on season 464, don't tell me anything about the goose's secret identity." So the demon currently known as Vijay began to strategize.

"Okay," he said, to a human he had profiled as both open-minded and basically disposable, "could you, like, kick a dog, and then I'll kill you, and then once you get downstairs you can summon me?"

"Wait, is that how it works? You kick one dog one time, and that gets you...?"

"I dunno, probably? Maybe? I... Yeah, I have no idea how it works, I don't really have a client-facing job, I work in supply chain -"

"And you call the damned 'clients?'"

"We used to say 'inmates,' but then management was like, 'this isn't a prison, they all _chose_ to be here.' So we had some interesting debates about free will for a couple weeks, until one side slingshotted the other into the sun. 'By your lights, it's not our decision to do this, because we don't make decisions. We're just immolating you because it's what we were always going to have done.'" He smiled wistfully at the reminiscence. Then he shook himself. "Anyhoo - can I kill you?"

"No."

"Jerk. I didn't want to give you my full name anyway."

* * *

It wasn't until he'd signed the fifth page of waivers that Vijay realized this store was not as it seemed. It took the clerk reading his fifth signature to realize Vijay was not, as he seemed, a person.

"Hey, smoldering sigils aren't legally binding," said the clerk. "I need a name, dude."

"I'm pretty sure nothing is legally binding on me," said Vijay.

"Still gotta sign. Let's start fresh." She lifted the paperwork from the counter and threw it into a recycling bin. Then she paused to regard the outline that had burned through the waivers and into the laminate countertop.

"If I signed my actual name, it'd do worse. Look, whatever happens, I promise I won't sue you."

"It's not the lawsuits I'm worried about. It's the curses. My first day on the job, a lady came in here and mixed the wrong prescriptions and turned herself into a frog, and then the frog died, and now I can't get bubble tea anymore."

"Bubble tea?"

"The tapioca balls turn into tadpoles. I'm just saying, I'm not liable for anyone's terrible potion decisions anymore. You want to see some haunted bagpipes?"

"Not really."

"Me, neither, but I don't get that option, do I?"

Vijay sighed and rummaged through his shopping basket until he found the most important article. He showed the clerk a small black bottle plastered with warning stickers in every color that came in neon and some that shouldn't. It also sported a paper tag reading "This will LITERALLY send you to ACTUAL HELL," in what looked like the clerk's handwriting. It also looked like it had been written under stressful circumstances - perhaps while under siege by haunted bagpipes, or wrestling an octopus. "I'll just take this, then, okay? You can't have any problem with an actual demon going back to actual Hell, right?" The clerk peered over into Vijay's basket to examine the other items. "I'll leave those. The acetone was just for flavor."

The clerk looked at the Hell potion, and at the counter, and at Vijay, and pursed her lips. "Fine. Just this once, under the circumstances -"

He popped the cork out and drained the bottle.

And then he was in the lobby of his apartment building, back home. Easy as that. He pressed the button to summon the elevator, rocked back on his heels, and waited.

"Elevator's out," said a voice behind him. He turned to see Walgarnus from Demon Resources, who lived thirty floors above him, and currently stood about thirty feet above him. Then he remembered he was still in that awful cramped little human form, shrugged into something more comfortable, and reduced the height difference to a mere twenty-eight feet. "Oh, hey, Vhaldorgos, didn't recognize you. Yeah, some idiot got the elevator stuck on Earth, can you believe?"

"Wow! That's so dumb! Who does that?" said Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth, grateful to no longer have sweat glands.

"So we'll have to use the stairs for the next couple hundred years. But hey, should be fixed by the time we get there, right?"

"Guess we should start climbing." But then he felt an upward tug, right under his closest analogue to a sternum. The red and black hall around him began to twist and blur. He had just enough time to yell "I'll be back in a minute please feed my ghost fish!" before he was bodily hauled back upward into the magic shop.

His reappearance upset several shelves and broke a phial of liquid that began melting the floor. The clerk stared at him in outrage. "I make one exception! One time! The back of the label clearly says you go to Hell for _thirty seconds,_ but I guess that was just too much reading for you!"

With a slowly dawning feeling of despair, he contorted himself back into being Vijay. "I, uh, I think I forgot to pay you, too. Do you take doublegold ingots, or are those neurotoxic to your kind?"

"Demon, begone."

"I'm going, I'm going. Sorry."

* * *

He'd been on Earth for two days on his initial trip, and now two weeks extra since he'd called the elevator. He was out of ideas, and he was crushingly homesick. The sun frightened him. It was closer than it was supposed to be, and several of his colleagues were still in there somewhere, forever ionizing into plasma and regenerating and ionizing again. He'd hit up all his supernatural contacts and inadvertently burned bridges to most of the human ones, and now he hung around delis and convenience stores at night while they boiled eggs to sell the next day, knowing no better way to catch that sulfurous smell he so missed.

He'd only taken one elevator out of service. Earth creatures were still dying, and a subset of apes, cephalopods, and some higher order birds must still be getting downstairs in some way, right?

It was out by a dumpster that he found his best bet: a woman leaving the 7-11 with a bag of taquitos and no soul. Although, granted, there were several ways to be de-souled; he let his eyes change to a more demonic configuration to get a better look.

Jackpot. Her aura crackled with the remembrance of musty tomes, strange effigies, a very specific knife and an even more specific cutting board. She must be an occultist, which simplified the equation.

He turned the rest of himself back into a demon. He dogged her through the shadows to a garden-style apartment building, and then met her on the landing.

"Hi," said Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth the Unending, "did you by any chance sell your soul to one of my bosses for access to forbidden knowledge?"

The woman looked up at the demon and took a blasé bite off the end of a taquito. "Nope."

He took a step back. His head scraped the cement above. "But..."

"I was doing fine at the forbidden knowledge thing without a patron. My soul was incidentally misplaced during the course of my research. I don't miss it." She locked eyes with Vijay, a staring contest he immediately lost, and finished her taquito. "'Cept maybe as a bargaining chip. So don't come around here thinking you can loan shark me. You don't have the dentition."

"That's not what I - I don't even have teeth, this is all exoskeleton - no, look. I want to offer you a deal." He held up three placating hands. "It's favorable, promise. Man, I don't think I'm actually _allowed_ to offer you a deal this good, I could get so busted -"

The occultist turned away from him and unlocked her apartment door. "Your sales department has fallen a long way since Mephistopheles."

"I keep telling people," said Vijay. "I'm not that kind of demon. I chain office equipment to walls."

She paused in the threshold. "Seriously?"

"So it doesn't escape."

The occultist experienced some thoughts about the underworld that had never occurred to her before. For novelty alone, she turned back to Vijay. "Elevator pitch. Go."

He winced. "Elevators are a sore point right now, so if you wouldn't mind -"

"What are you offering me?"

"Eternal life, uh, probably." The occultist straightened, alert. "Look. You don't have a soul. You're going to hell when you die. I'm gonna assume that you don't want that. I, on the contrary, would _love_ to go to Hell. So, what I'm proposing is... swapsies."

"'Swapsies.'"

"Yeah. When you die, call me up and I'll take your place. I go back home and you, I guess, keep fumbling around behind the Veil trying to unlock all the ancient mysteries that my kind totally already knows all of." Okay, that last jab was unnecessary, but did she have to keep acting so unimpressed? It wounds a demon's pride to be looked at like Joe Shmoe, even if they are, adjusting for brimstone, just such a Shmoe.

"I don't plan on dying any time soon. And I'm not letting you kill me."

"I know. You mortals are kind of a pain about that. But do you plan on dying sooner than seven hundred ninety-nine years, eleven months, twelve days, sixteen hours, and 38.7 minutes from now?"

The occultist raised her eyebrows. "If I can't avoid it." One advantage of soul removal is pitch-perfect sarcasm.

"Cool, cool. Okay, then here are the terms. I give you my name. You agree not to use it until your last breath. I agree to leave you completely alone until you use it. Hell gets one soulless being, i.e. me, and the other one, a.k.a. you, stays here to singlehandedly keep the taper candle industry afloat. Deal?"

The capacity for mislaying one's own soul implies a certain level of risk tolerance. The occultist haggled, but not much.

* * *

It occurred to him afterward that he should have asked her some lifestyle questions, so he could get a better ballpark on how much time he would have to kill. But he'd agreed not to bother her - and he was a demon, not an insurance salesman. So, resignedly, he settled in for the haul of indeterminate length.

He tried at first to spend his time in places that reminded him of home. Caves. Volcanoes. Caves in the sides of volcanoes. Poorly illuminated saunas. He once considered shrinking himself down and living inside a toaster oven for a week or so, but then wondered how he would explain himself if anyone saw him, and hung his head and shuffled away.

Next he tried asking humans for their ideas of hell on earth. A surprising number were related to transportation: certain interstate highways; the Department of Motor Vehicles; a stalled subway train; discount airliners; a broken elevator; "whoa, are you okay? All I said was 'elevator!' Do you need to sit down?"

But he was not in hell. He was among the living. In objective terms he wouldn't be here for long - but probably it would be long enough that he ought to stop fighting it.

In the instant he realized this, he came closer than he ever would to understanding the mortal point of view. Then he let himself be dragged into an argument about cinnamon whiskey ( _not_ "hot as hell," barely more than a palate cleanser, and he spoke as an authority) and lost the thread.

* * *

"Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth the Unending," said a voice he had forgotten, and Vijay - but he was about to stop being Vijay forever, wasn't he? - that big guy with the long name followed the call.

"We're actually all unending," he mused, stepping out of a mirror into an unfamiliar basement. "I was young when I picked that title, and now it's kind of embarrassing. A real tryhard thing to do, you know? Like, if you called yourself 'Cecilia Who Has Lungs,' it might impress a flatworm - humans are the worms in this analogy -"

The occultist had an ornamental sword through her chest for reasons unclear to any but herself, and it made her impatient. She gestured for Vhaldorgos-Jalalloloth to shut up and make the switch already. Then she died.

A rift opened in the floor. A fog rolled off the body of Cecilia Who Until Recently Had Lungs. Vijay, out of simple courtesy, pulled the sword out of her. Then he grabbed a handful of fog and pulled it out of the rift. It was a human life, lying febrile and insubstantial in his hands. He'd never liked touching the things. But a deal was a deal, so he gave it back to her, and jumped into the rift himself without waiting to see what she would do.

There was a lot of falling involved.

But just a few minutes at terminal velocity, a bracing impact, getting scraped into a bucket, and thirty to forty seconds to reconstitute himself from the sludge, and he'd be home. And all would be as it should be.

He would put nutmeg in his morning cup of motor oil.


End file.
